Tuesday, 29 January 2008

Has anyone else noticed the trend for people to talk about "Digitalisation" rather than "Digitisation"? Over the past year, student essays, newspaper reports, andvariouswebsites have started using "Digitalisation" to mean the process of creating digital representation of analogue objects and media. Now, I know language shifts and changes, and to some extent, "Digitalisation" makes kinda sense - you are making something digital, right? And there is the whole digitisation/digitization argument, but lets not get into that. Instead, lets have a look at some definitions:

Digitisation: The process of creating digital files by scanning or otherwise converting analogue materials.The resulting digital copy, or digital surrogate, would then be classed as digital material and then subject to the same broad challenges involved in preserving access to it, as "born digital" materials. (From the Digital Preservation Coalition website).

Digitalisation: The administration of digitalis or one of its active constituents to a patient or an animal so that the required physiological changes occur in the body; also, the state of the body resulting from this. (From the Oxford English Dictionary).

So now you know. Spell carefully, my friends....

ps. Yes I know in the early 1960s digitalisation was also used to mean digitisation. But it settled down pretty quickly into digitisation.

pps. Yes, I know policing the interweb for spelling mistakes is a pointless task. I was only pointing out an observation...

Thursday, 24 January 2008

Something that's been intriguing me for a while is the encouragement from traditional news outlets, such as the BBC, CNN, ITV, etc for the general public to submit pictures of newsworthy items to them, via mobile phone or email.

News agencies actively solicit user generated content. You can find out how to submit your prize winning photo journalism, or just-happened-to-be-there shots, to the BBC, here. The short version is, email them to yourpics@bbc.co.uk, although beware, by submitting them you grant the BBC:

a royalty-free, non-exclusive licence to publish and otherwise use the material in any way that we want.

There are other ways to make money of Britney Spears shaving her head, should that be your want, if you find the stalking of innocent celebrities acceptable. But lets suppose that you just want to submit them to the BBC for all to see for free.

How popular is this service?

I wondered. So I asked the BBC (well, filed a Freedom of Information enquiry to their FOI office), and it goes something like this.

They dont keep stats on individual submitters, in case of data protection issues. But in general, on routine days, between 100 and 150 users will email or message in 150 to 250 images from around the globe. On days when something UK-wide happens, such as the snow flurries which covered the country on the 8th February 2007, thousands of users can contribute: in this case, the BBC received 7316 images in 24 hours.

Tuesday, 22 January 2008

Sometimes, when marking essays, you come across things noted by students that have completely passed you by (but shhhh, dont tell them that). An essay on the paperless office points me to a campaign run by the National Library of New Zealand at LIANZA Conference 2007: TRANZFORM - Te Tīnihanga (9-12 September) where they placed catalogue cardswhich said "In 2017 libraries will be...." in conference packs, and asked for responses from attendees. An interesting flickr set to explore. [link]

Thursday, 17 January 2008

Flickr have just announced a project called The Commons, which they describe as

Your opportunity to contribute to describing the world's public photo collections

A pilot project with the Library of Congress,

The key goals of this pilot project are to firstly give you a taste of the hidden treasures in the huge Library of Congress collection, and secondly to how your input of a tag or two can make the collection even richer.

It will be interesting to see the range of tags and comments people take the time to put forward (but I'm not sure that comments like "neat train picture :)" are doing much for our understanding of LOC image collections!)

I'm writing a book chapter just now about personal digital image collections, and the rapidly changing (changed?) imaging environment we now utilise. I was reminded of this article by Tom Ang (a photographer and presenter who writes some very accessible introductory books to digital imaging) which featured in the guardian a couple of years ago, but still packs a punch.

In 1998, 67bn images were made worldwide. We know that because 3bn rolls of film were sold. It is impossible to be accurate, but with a world population of digital cameras exceeding a third of a billion on top of millions of film-using cameras still in use, it is likely that more pictures are taken every year than in the previous 160 years of photography put together. In addition to the other pollutions we have unleashed on ourselves, we may well have to thank digital photography for giving us image pollution.[link]

You have to love Worth1000.com (which is a daily image manipulation contest site)'s galleries. This one, "archaeological anomalies" sets out to provide the missing links between man and beast.... and the moon..... and disney... and apple...

About Melissa Terras

I'm the Professor of Digital Humanities in the Department of Information Studies, University College London, and Director of UCL Centre for Digital Humanities. I teach Digitisation, and my research focuses on the use of computational techniques to enable research in the humanities that would otherwise be impossible. My UCL webpage contains more information about publications and research projects. I also hang out at @melissaterras. This was my personal blog, and everything I said here was in a personal capacity - you can find my new blog over at melissaterras.org. I'm preserving this content to prevent bit rot, but its all replicated over the road, too - hope to see you there.